Tag Archives: movies

Theater Thursday: Airplane!

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Airplane! is anAmerican comedy film, first released on 27 June 1980, produced, directed, and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams,and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! starredRobert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lorna Petterson. For release in Australia, Japan and the Philippines, Airplane! was re-titled as Flying High. Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster movie genre. It is unique among film parodies in that Airplane! is a virtual remake of the 1957 Canadian airplane disaster movie Zero Hour. … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday 02/24/08: Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’

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The Birds is a 1963 horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the short story, The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. The film’s innovative special effects, soundtrack, and apocalyptic theme influenced later “revenge of nature” disaster films. Unlike most other films of its era, The Birds did not have a music score or an ending in the conventional sense.   Beautiful and young Melanie Daniels (“Tippi” Hedren), a wealthy socialite whose father is the proprietor of a large newspaper, visits a SanFrancisco pet shop … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday: A Room With A View

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A Room with a View is a 1986 Academy Award-winning feature film, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The film was directed by James Ivory and produced byIsmail Merchant. The film is based upon the novel, A Room with a View by E.M. Forster and stars Maggie Smith (Charlotte Bartlett), Helena Bonham Carter (Lucy Honeychurch), Denholm Elliott (Mr. Emerson), Julian Sands (George Emerson), Simon Callow (Mr. Beebe), Judi Dench (Miss Eleanor Lavish), Daniel Day-Lewis (Cecil Vyse), and Rupert Graves (Freddy Honeychurch). The film tells … Continue reading →

The Children’s Hour

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The Children’s Hour was originally a stage play in 1934 written by Lillian Hellman. It was a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back, she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women’s careers, relationships and lives. The play is based on the following incident. In 1810 in Edinburgh, … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday: The Joy Luck Club

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The Joy Luck Club was one of my favorite movies of the nineties.After the successful independent features about Chinese-American life DIM SUM and EAT A BOWL OF TEA, director Wayne Wang took on the daunting task of adapting Amy Tan’s sprawling, multigenerational best-seller THE JOY LUCK CLUB. This movie was made in 1993. After her mother’s death, June (Ming-Na Wen) is asked to take her place in a mahjong club. The three other members, like her mother, were all born in China before the 1949 … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday: The Color Purple

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One of my favorite films that I remember was The Color Purple. Heart-wrenching and universally loved, The Color Purple isn’t really about the color purple. It’s about the trials and tribulations of black women in the turn-of-the-century south, and how they conquered over all the abuse, the poverty, and the lack of anything resembling a life. The Color Purple received a whopping 11 Oscar nominations and won precisely zero. It was directed by Steven Speilberg. The movie tells the life story of Celie, played by … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday: Inherit The Wind

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Inherit the Wind (1960) portrays, in partly fictionalized form, the famous and dramatic courtroom “Monkey Trial” battle (in the sultry summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee) between two famous lawyers (Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan) who volunteered to heatedly argue both sides of the case (over 12 days, including two weekends). Its story centers around the issue of evolution vs. creationism, in the prosecution of 24 year-old Dayton High School mathematics teacher and sports coach – and substitute science teacher – John T. Scopes … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday: Sophie’s Choice

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The sunny streets of Brooklyn, just after World War II. A young would-be writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) shares a boarding house with beautiful Polish immigrant Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her tempestuous lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline); their friendship changes his life. This bestselling novel by William Styron was made into an unforgetably  well made film in 1982. Director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men) provides a steady, intelligent path into the harrowing story of Sophie, whose flashback memories of the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp form … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday 03/03/08: Ordinary People

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Ordinary People is an Academy Award-winning 1980 American motion picture drama and the directorial debut of Robert Redford. The story is about the disintegration of an upper middle class  family inLake Forest, Illinois, following the death of the oldest son. It was based upon the 1976 novel by Judith Guest. The film was a critical and commercial success, winning that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture and various other major film awards. The Jarretts, a family from Chicago’s North Shore, try to return to normal … Continue reading →

Theater Thursday 03/17/08: The Four Seasons

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The Four Seasons is a 1981 romantic comedy film starring Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Rita Moreno, Jack Weston and Bess Armstrong.  The story revolves around three couples who take vacations together during each of the seasons.  After this pattern has been established, Nick (Cariou) leaves his wife Anne (Dennis) for a much younger woman, Ginny (Armstrong).  Nick then brings Ginny on the couples’ shared vacations, causing the other two couples to be uncomfortable with the situation.  I think this movie is … Continue reading →